On the deck of the world
The year comes to an end and we do not so much choose to move on, but we are impelled by the force of time. Indeed, we are expelled from the old year and into the new, as from the innocence of our youthful garden. Like it or not, we must adjust to our new lives and make them our own.
This is my last post to you from 2024. This moment makes me think of one of my favorite quotes from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. In writing about why he chose to leave his cabin in the woods after some three years he says:
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side… How worn and dusty, then, must be the Highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
Though we are not choosing to leave 2024, we do have several more lives to live if we choose. I hope we each choose to live before the mast of 2025, on the deck of the world.
Willing good for each of you, see again you next year!
(Pic above is Jackson’s Landing on Christmas Eve. Jackson’s Landing is where I most often put in my kayak.)